Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory has been a cinematic gold standard for director Phil Johnston (writer on Disney’s Wreck-It-Ralph and Zootopia and co-director of Ralph Breaks the Internet), but his favorite Roald Dahl novel is The Twits, about a hateful couple that plays nasty tricks on each other. Naturally, he leapt at the chance to adapt the obscure work for Netflix.

The Twits (streaming October 17), though, began as a limited series with three original David Byrne songs before getting canceled before they could animate. However, they pivoted to a feature and the design team and the now defunct UK animation studio Jellyfish Pictures continued on. Nothing was going to deter Johnston from making this passion project, which was a far cry from anything he could do at Disney.

Every character Johnston has ever connected with has been the outsider looking in, and he saw this story being more relevant than ever. “These are just [irredeemable], terrible people,” he said, “and I love that idea of being able to take an amorphous story and craft something that was still true to that anarchic nature of the book. And try to make it an allegory for today about hatred and small mindedneess, and the lack of empathy in the world.”

Johnston expanded the premise beyond the couple and their cruelty toward each other and their magical monkeys. In the film, two orphans — Beesha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Bubsy (Ryan Lopez) — join forces with a family of magical animals (from Loompaland, no less) to save their city from the maniacal Mr. (Johnny Vegas) and Mrs. Twit (Margo Martindale), whose dream is to operate the most disgusting amusement park in the world: Twitlandia.

“I found that it was too hard to sustain the movie as just the Twits’ story and their love language being hatred,” Johnston added. “And so I brought in these kids and the Muggle Womps [a family of monkeys]. Most Dahl stories are frame through the eyes of innocent children. And adults are either rotten or ineffectual or both. The Muggle Womps were in the novel and I took the idea to use their sorrow to create a power source. Again, kind of a good theme for today.”

The Twits are confusing agents of chaos, who, at first, are buffoonish, until you realize they’re dangerous. “I knew from its inception that The Twits would be an unconventional animated film — in look, in tone, in theme,” Johnston explained. “You won’t find a bright blue sky or a golden sunset in this movie. But you will find beauty in an oil slick rainbow or in the paved-over cobblestones of a neglected street or in the patchwork, wabi-sabi aesthetic of the Twits’ house — itself a living, breathing character in the film.”

Johnston wanted to convey a stop-motion-like collage vibe for the design and animation, inspired by Swaybox, the puppet/ animation studio in New Orleans.”We call their animation style Twons, which is Twit animation, borrowed from a bunch of difference reference points to create a broken aesthetic,” he added.

“We started with these hard, fast rules at Jellyfish [which spanned five continents],” he continued. “Like the facial acting being very realistic because the design is so heightened in the characters. And the shape language is so pushed. And I thought it would be interesting to combine those two things. But then somewhere along the line, I said, ‘Mrs. Twit should be able to throw Mr. Twit 40 feet in the air.’ So it went full Looney Tunes at times when it was appropriate. And full, crazy violence.”

Meanwhile, the Muggle Womps are not exactly monkeys, but insead are a Muppet-like combination of monkeys and armadillos, which produce magical, bioluminescent dandruff when they’re set free.

Then there’s the retro world building from production designer Drew Hartel (The Sea Beast). This was partly based on the town in Wisconsin where Johnston grew up. “I like the idea of a Rust Belt town that had seen better days as the tripe capital of the world” he said. “Having grown up in a town where there were paper mills, which we thought would be there forever and then went away, I wanted to design something that evoked that. Milwaukee and Cleveland and Chicago. The idea of finding beauty within broken things and weird things.”

There’s nothing beatiful about the Twits’ windowless house and disgusting amusement park, which are expressions of their broken and weird natures. The house, though, is a masterpiece of twisted invention: the ultimate collage of stolen junk.The kitchen retaining wall is made of refrigerators and there’s a hall of toilets. Best of all, their bed moves through the house on rails. This becomes the most thrilling ride in the film for the two orphans.

“There’s so much of this house we could invent, and the bed goes past so many rooms,” Johnston recalled. “The taxidermy room, Mr. Twit’s workshop and all these dangerouos saw blades, and seeing the pipes within the walls, where there are rats. If you go slowly, there are all kinds of little treats in there that you can see. We cranked it up to 11 with the Twit insanity.”

The Twits will screen as part of a Pre-Animation Is Film Festival Preview on October 13th at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood at 7:00 pm. Johnston will be on hand for a Q&A. This is a free event.